György Ligeti

In the past year I've seriously fallen in love with the work of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Like most movie buffs, I've always known the music that was used in some Stanley Kubrick films, particularly in "2001: A Space Odyssey", but for some reason I'd never gotten round to listening to his other stuff. I dunno why. Maybe I thought it would be too 'difficult' or something. Well, it's not, really. it's beautiful.

If you need to remind yourself what the "2001" music sounds like, then here's a couple of youtube clips. The main pieces used in that movie are "Atmospheres" (for orchestra), "Lux Aeterna" (for choir) and "Requiem" (for choir)





These pieces are written in the spacey microtonal 'cloudy' style he used in the 1960s. However, being a real artist always looking for new frontiers, he didn't keep on writing in this style forever. He moved towards a more 'clear' and mathematical style in later works, particularly after he discovered fractal math and the works of composer Conlon Nancarrow in the 1980s and started writing his piano works and works for mechanical instruments.

Here are two examples of his powerful Piano etudes, these are known as "Autumn in Warsaw" and "The Devil's Staircase":





And here's a nice recording of two of the six short and accesible 'bagatellen'



And the first movement from the first string quartet:



To get started on Ligeti, the best way is probably to buy "Clear and Cloudy", the budget 4CD box of his works on Deutsche Grammophon. This includes all the famous "2001" pieces, plus his string quartets and some mind blowing organ works, and various other goodies. It has a pretty cool 'rock n roll' cover too:
However, there's a lot of cool stuff not included in that box. The "Ligeti Project"/"Ligeti Edition" is a series of CD's (the series was started by one record company and finished by another, that's why it has two titles - there's an overview of the series HERE) that more or less include his complete works. Not every CD in the series is a complete hit... some of them include too much early work from the 50s that's usually nice enough, but not really mind blowing on the level of his later mature works.

The two most essential of the discs that I own are probably these:

"Ligeti Edition 5: Mechanical Music" features music not actually played by human beings, its too fast and complex to be played by a human. It has been programmed into barrel organs and mechanical pianos. Particularly the music for barrel organ is stunning and beautiful, featuring harmonies that are simply out of this world, yet also at the same time very accessible. This has become one of my favourite cd's of all time.
"Ligeti Edition 3: Piano Works" features his famous piano etudes, and it's a really nice collection of modern piano music.

Edit: and apparently there's a new budget box set out which collects the 5 Ligeti Project CD's. Even though the fifth and last cd is mostly scraping the bottle of older stuff, the four other cd's should make this a serious rival to the "Clear and Cloudy" box as a nicely priced introduction.